Cosmology with a Variable Chaplygin Gas

We consider a new generalized Chaplygin gas model that includes the original Chaplygin gas model as a special case. In such a model the generalized Chaplygin gas evolves as from dust to quiessence or phantom. We show that the background evolution for the model is equivalent to that for a coupled dark energy model with dark matter. The constraints from the current type Ia supernova data favour a phantom-like Chaplygin gas model.